The water must have come up high in the drainage ditch – nearly flooding over the blacktop – then froze at the surface, then went back down, fast. As the stream dropped away, the icey surface layer stayed, suspended in mid-air by the weed-stalks. From my car, at slow country speed, I notice the glass sheet hovering mystically above the empty ditch. As if some waterskin had been molted, in place, by the creek, before it slithered into the river.